Republicans on verge of falling to third-party status in California

On Friday, the office of California Secretary of State Alex Padilla posted updated voter registration statistics in advance of the state’s June 5 primary, and the data shows a continuation of the same bleak trend line for Golden State Republicans that we’ve written about in prior cycles: The GOP is simply hemorrhaging voters, both in raw numbers and as a percentage of registered voters.

Overall, just over 4.8 million Californians are currently registered as Republicans, representing 25.4 percent of the total electorate. That’s a loss of almost half a million voters—and a huge drop from the party’s 36 percent share—since the end of 1997, the first year for which statistics are available. And that drop comes despite the fact that California’s population has jumped from 32.5 million to 39.3 million over the last two decades.

Over that same 20-year time period, meanwhile, Democrats gained nearly 1.7 million new registered voters, bringing their tally to 8.5 million. Despite that growth, though, Democratic voter registration as a share of the electorate has mostly flatlined over that time period, settling from 46.8 percent in 1997 to 44.6 percent this year.

The reason? An explosion of voters—an increase of nearly 3 million—who have elected to register as independents (or what the state calls “no party preference”). Independents now make up an even 25.0 percent of all California voters. That’s more than double their 11.9 percent share in 1997, and just a hair behind where the GOP stands.

To make matters even worse for Republicans, these voters who have elected to express no party preference tend to favor Democrats in the polling booth. And here’s the real kicker: It’s very probable that registered Republicans will fall behind both Democrats and “no party preference” voters at some point by Election Day this fall, essentially relegating the California GOP to third-party status. This, in the state that sent both Nixon and Reagan to the White House.

5. Eventually.

6. When Pete Wilson was governor, the California GOP went after Latinos in

a very big way:

snip

In office from 1991 to 1999, Wilson prominently embraced Proposition 187 in 1994, which would have banned undocumented immigrants from using state services. It passed, but was later thrown out by the courts. Wilson also supported Proposition 209, which banned racial preference for disadvantaged minorities, and Proposition 227, which prohibited bilingual education. Both of these survived court challenges.

But the Republican Party of California did not survive the Wilson administration. Wilson and his supporters effectively branded the party in this state as anti-immigrant and hostile to diversity in general. Despite the election and re-election of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 2000s, the trajectory of the Republican Party in the nation’s most populous state has been a steady slide into irrelevance.

The state is currently governed by a Democratic supermajority in the legislature, a Democrat holds the governorship, both U.S. senators are Democrats, and 39 of California’s 53 representatives in the House of Representatives are Democrats.

President Trump is, in effect, repeating Pete Wilson’s playbook on the national stage. His boisterous and inflammatory language about immigrants, and his legally suspect executive orders, are portraying the national Republicans as anti-immigrant and anti-diversity.

The racism and xenophobia in California in the 1990s were vicious. Latino voters turned against the GOP in California because of the way Republicans scapegoated and hassled them, and with some luck the same thing will happen nationwide because of the White nationalist Trumpists. They don't even try to be subtle any more. They are as blatantly prejudiced as possible.

Just like now across the nation, there was a drive in California to register more Latino voters.